Hungry Families Don’t Move Congress—Delayed Flights Do

For all the drama surrounding a government shutdown, Congress has made one thing painfully clear: it’s unbothered by the consequences as long as those consequences fall on ordinary Americans. If a prolonged shutdown means people lose health care, that’s dismissed as unfortunate. If federal workers go without paychecks for weeks, lawmakers call it “part of the process.” If families who rely on SNAP face empty refrigerators, the human cost is treated as abstract—distant enough to ignore.

But the moment a shutdown threatens to delay flights or cancel them altogether because air traffic controllers are overworked, understaffed, or going unpaid, Congress suddenly rediscovers urgency. The same lawmakers who tolerate missed paychecks and hungry families somehow cannot tolerate the prospect of airport chaos.

It’s not hard to see why. Members of Congress fly constantly—to fundraisers, districts, cable-news studios. Their donors and lobbyists fly constantly, too. Disrupted flights aren’t theoretical; they’re personal. They interfere with schedules that matter to the powerful.

This double standard reveals an uncomfortable truth: suffering is only unacceptable when it inconveniences the people in charge. If Congress felt even a fraction of the empathy for families losing food benefits that it feels for delayed departures at Reagan National, shutdowns wouldn’t drag on for days—let alone weeks.